a/n: this is another excerpt from my current wip novel. it relates (vaguely) to the last piece i published in this collection
She held the pen in her hand, eyes wide, filled with tears. It wasn't what she'd wanted for her eighth birthday present from her brother; she'd expected better. Of all people, her expectations had been highest for her brother. And of course his smiling in the face of her tears only made her more upset. She threw it at him, got more angry when it missed by a mile, and stormed off to her room.
Not long after that, no more than a few weeks, he'd returned it to her, and she'd cried yet again, because she was sorry. She asked him to teach her to use it, and he did. He told her that one day it would help her do something great.
Only months later she was crying over it again. She'd lost it, and it was far too precious to her to lose. It was her means of creating her own friends. Her brother had pacified her with a new gift: a computer.
Just two or three years later, it had again reappeared, this time in her brother's room after a noise, a clatter, and a blast of music had drawn her in. He'd seemed as surprised as she was to find it, although for a long time afterwards she wondered how it had gotten in there. A tear of happiness slid down her cheek at it's discovery despite her confusion.
Only five years later, she'd cried over it again, this time because for all that it had given her, what it had taken was far too great. She'd solved the mystery of it's secret disappearance, but even that was no consolation when she found the note with the date of its rediscovery on a letter from her brother in place of his life.
Ten long years later, years of pain and mental paralysis and regrets, she smiled and held it tight to her chest. It had never been a trade, she knew now, of her brother's blood for this pen's ink. Instead, the two were interwoven, part of each other, and that meant that, as she finally finished the last word of the first of the many great somethings she would make with it, her brother was with her. When he'd given her a gift, it had been more than a pen; it had been a piece of himself, and that was what made it so completely irreplaceable.
